A Proper Marriage. Doris Lessing

light from the street lamps.

       Chapter Three

      ‘Well, Matty, and now you’ll be free to get on with your own work.’

      It was with these words that Douglas dropped his parting kiss on her cheek when he left for the office each morning, and with a look of pure satisfaction. The kindly, confident young man crossed the untidy bedroom towards the door, bouncing a little from the balls of his feet, smiling backwards at Martha, who was sitting in a tangle of crumpled and stained silk in a mess of bedclothes, and vanished whistling down the corridor. The gleam of proprietary satisfaction never failed to arouse in Martha a flush of strong resentment, which was as unfailingly quenched by a succeeding guilt. To account for the resentment, for above all it was essential to account for every contradictory emotion that assailed one, she had already formed a theory.

      After Douglas had left, she kicked off the bedclothes, and allowed herself to fall backwards on the cooling sheets and pillows. She lay quiet. Opposite her, two neat squares of bright blue sky, in one of which was suspended the stilled black wheel of the fair; reflected sunlight quivered hot on the wall. From all around, from above, from below, the sound of voices, a broom swishing, a child crying. But here, in the heart of the building, two rooms, white, silent, empty. And, on the bed, Martha, uncomfortably fingering the silk of her nightdress, trying most conscientiously to relax into the knowledge of space and silence. At the same time she was thinking of Douglas, now already at his office; she could see the self-conscious look with which he allowed himself to be teased; every night he came back to share with her his pleasure in how the office had said this or that. And how she hated him for it! And it was her husband about whom she was feeling this resentment, this violent dislike.

      Martha, ignoring the last few months in town before her marriage, because she could not bear to think about them, went back to that period when she was a girl on the farm. From this, several incidents had been selected by her need for a theory. There had been that young man who … and the other one … and that occasion when…After hours of determined concentration she would emerge with the phrase, ‘Women hate men who take them for granted.’ It would have done for a story in a magazine. But that impersonal ‘woman’ was a comfort – briefly, for no sooner had she reached it than she saw the image that the words conjured up: something sought, wooed, capricious, bestowing favours. No, there was something extremely distasteful about that capricious female; no sooner had Martha caught a glimpse of her than she must repudiate her entirely; she was certainly from the past! The suggestion of coyness was unbearable. Yet she and Douglas had achieved a brotherly friendliness almost immediately; and when he bounced cheerfully into bed, clutching her in a cheerful and companionable act of love that ignored the female which must be wooed, she undoubtedly loathed him from the bottom of her heart, an emotion which was as inevitably followed by a guilty affection. The situation was, as she jauntily and bleakly put it, unsatisfactory.

      She therefore got out of bed and went into the living room, and knelt in front of the bookcase. Books. Words. There must surely be some pattern of words which would neatly and safely cage what she felt – isolate her emotions so that she could look at them from outside. For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves by literature. And the books which spoke most directly were those which had come out of Western Europe during the past hundred years, and of those, the personal and self-confessing. And so she knelt in front of a bookcase, in driving need of the right arrangement of words; for it is a remarkable fact that she was left unmoved by criticisms of the sort of person she was by parents, relations, preachers, teachers, politicians and the people who write for the newspapers; whereas an unsympathetic description of a character similar to her own in a novel would send her into a condition of anxious soul-searching for days. Which suggests that it is of no use for artists to insist, with such nervous disinclination for responsibility, that their productions are only ‘a divine play’ or ‘a reflection from the creative fires of irony’, etc., etc. while the Marthas of this world read and search with the craving thought, What does this say about my life? It will not do at all – but it must be admitted that there always came a point where Martha turned from the novelists and tale tellers to that section of the bookcase which was full of books called The Psychology of …, The Behaviour of …, A Guide to …, with the half-formulated thought that the novelists had not caught up with life; for there was no doubt that the sort of things she or Stella or Alice talked about found no reflection in literature – or rather, it was the attitudes of mind they took for granted that did not appear there, from which she deduced that women in literature were still what men, or the men-women, wished they were. In this other part of the bookcase, however, were no such omissions; she found what she was thinking and feeling described with an admirable lack of ambiguity. And yet, after hours of search among the complexities and subtleties of character, she was likely to return to her bedroom profoundly comforted, with some such resounding and original remark as ‘The young husband, therefore, must be careful to be specially understanding during the difficult weeks after marriage.’ For, since Douglas, the young husband in question, so logically insisted on relying upon the common sense she insisted on, she must with some part of herself take his place by being understanding, compassionate, etc. Martha was able to preserve an equilibrium because of an observing and satirical eye focused upon her own behaviour from a superior vantage point that was of course in no way influenced by that behaviour. She achieved quite extraordinary degrees of self-forbearance by this device.

      In the bedroom the bedclothes still lying dragged back, clothes lay everywhere; the morning was slipping past and she was not dressed. And now this question of work confronted her. She had understood she was not alone in her position of a woman who disdained both housework and a ‘job’, but was vaguely expected by her husband – but only because of her own insistence on it – to be engaged in work of her own. Both Stella and Alice had claimed the state. Martha had heard their respective husbands speak to them in precisely the same tone of pride and satisfaction that Douglas used to her. Their wives were not as those of other men.

      Feeling the distant pressure of this ‘work’, Martha dutifully went to the bathroom to equip herself to face it.

      The bathroom was modern. A high window showed yet another angle of clear blue sky, together with the tops of the trees in the park. A large white bath filled with heavy greenish water where spangles of light quivered, white cabinets, white shelves – it was all a gleam of white enamel. Martha took off her nightdress, and was alone with her body. But it was not that calm and obedient body which had been so pleasant a companion. White it was, and solid and unmarked – but heavy, unresponsive; her flesh was uncomfortable on her bones. It burned and unaccountably swelled; it seemed to be pursuing ideas of its own. Inside the firm thick flesh a branch of bones which presumably remained unchanged: the thought was comforting. Martha looked down at her shape of flesh with the anxious thought that it was upon this that the marriage depended; for this, in fact, they – she and Douglas – had been allowed by society to shut themselves away in two high rooms with a bathroom attached. It was almost with the feeling of a rider who was wondering whether his horse would make the course that she regarded this body of hers, which was not only divided from her brain by the necessity of keeping open that cool and dispassionate eye, but separated into compartments of its own. Martha had after all been provided with a map of her flesh by ‘the book’, in which each area was marked by the name of a different physical sensation, so that her mind was anxiously aware, not only of a disconnected partner, a body, but of every part of it, which might or might not come up to scratch at any given occasion. There were moments when she felt she was strenuously held together by nothing more than an act of will. She was beginning to feel that this view of herself was an offence against what was deepest and most real in her. And again she thought of the simple women of the country, who might be women in peace, according to their instincts, without being made to think and disintegrate themselves into fragments. During those few weeks of her marriage Martha was always accompanied by that other, black woman, like an invisible sister simpler and wiser than herself; for no matter how much she reminded herself of statistics and progress, she envied her from the bottom of her heart. Without, of course having any intention of emulating her: loyalty to progress